


A Single Strike

by North_of_Kyrimorut



Series: Foxiyo Week 2020 [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Darth Vader (Comics), Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Force-Sensitive CC-1010 | Fox, Fox Thoughts, Post-Order 66 (Star Wars), Stream of Consciousness, The Force Is Weird (Star Wars), The Force Ships It (Star Wars), kind of, more like, what is a grammatical tense again?, you know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:34:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28421781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/North_of_Kyrimorut/pseuds/North_of_Kyrimorut
Summary: Fox faces the future and the future faces back.In which the Jedi Temple decides to act like a Jedi temple and, whoops, I guess Fox is Force sensitive now?Foxiyo Week 2020 – Shatter: fragment, burst, fracture.
Relationships: Riyo Chuchi/CC-1010 | Fox
Series: Foxiyo Week 2020 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2077149
Comments: 2
Kudos: 26





	A Single Strike

**Author's Note:**

> Pulled some story context from the Darth Vader comics, but we don't go THERE with it.
> 
> This was actually the first short I wrote for Foxiyo Week, so I was still finding my Fox footing. Thankfully, so was he.
> 
> Posting at midnight because my work schedule blew up on me, and it is _technically_ the 31st

The future was not fixed. It was alive with motion and energy, if not _intent_. Fox had always suspected as much, even as it was drilled deep into his mind that _you were made for this one thing—you have this one set purpose—you have one inevitable destiny._

But as he grew and lived in double-time, as the early grey started to thread his hair and sink into his skin, his suspicion became certainty. It came it bursts of clarity and fragments of hope. In the end, he knew with the knife-edged instincts of solider born and bred that there was always another path. He may have chosen to walk the one set before him, but he still knew. There was always more. There was always a choice.

The weight of that reality bore down on him as never before as he stood in front of the ruined Jedi Temple. At his back, Fox had two full companies of shock troopers. It was a cobbled together group, taken piecemeal from the many garrisons that had been recalled to the Core. Few of them had ever been in the Guard. He was strangely glad of that. The lack of well-practiced cohesion made Fox’s command more difficult, but he was relieved that most of his closest brothers were not made to witness this particular carnage.

“Perimeter secure, sir.” Fox’s second-in-command for this op had been an ARC trooper with the 187th and stood with the easy assurance that came from years of successful campaigns. His name—well, never mind names now. Fox kept him close not for his competency, but out of an abundance of caution. Troopers who had not been obliged to personally enforce the emergency order on their own Jedi… did not always integrate well with the new order. He wondered if the old ARC’s eye had tracked up at any point, to the broken top story of the Temple where the Council had once worked out its treachery in tandem to the Chancellor’s. And if so, had he also taken a moment to acknowledge, _my General once sat there. I never saw this coming._

Well, Fox never had a general who had walked the halls of the Temple. But something about this place nagged at him. Black smoke still rose from the wreckage, small and fading wisps from a structure that had stood for millennia. They seemed to curl past the filters in his helmet, stinging his eyes and throat, and saying— _there is always a choice._

 _Yes, I know,_ Fox thought irritably. _I made a choice._ This _is my choice._

 _Is it?_ asked the smoke.

“We wait for Lord Vader’s command,” Fox said aloud. “The archivist may look like a harmless little granny, but—”

“Jedi,” the ARC trooper finished with a note of excitement in his voice. He shifted the weight of the repeating slugthrower he carried.

“Jedi,” Fox repeated, with far less emotion. “Gun down anything with a lightsaber.”

“Aye, sir.” It struck Fox suddenly that it was not excitement in the other man’s voice. It was not even the coiled anticipation of a battle at hand. It was fear. This battle-tested ARC trooper had something to prove. They all did—every single one of them. They had all been born to serve the Republic; now, they were bound to serve the Empire.

_That is not the choice you made._

…No. No, it was not.

The longer Fox had served on Coruscant, the less he believed in the Republic—but the more he believed in its people. Sure, he had seen the worst of the worst from the underworld all the way up to the 5127th level. But the world wasn’t all hardened criminals and corrupt politicians, and Fox had managed to find that soft place where duty and _care_ could coexist. He could care about the families finding their way in a big galaxy, or the advocates trying to make a better life for their people against astronomical odds. He could most certainly care about his brothers and the handful of civilians that had been drawn into their orbit and chosen to stay. He served them and kept them as safe as he could, operating neatly within the framework he was most familiar with.

It was exhausting, thankless work. And now… he no longer had the people he loved to help lighten the load or lift his spirits. Most of his batch-brothers were gone, one way or another, as were the brothers who had severed alongside him in the Guard. Thire was still alive, but he had not been the same since returning from Mustafar. Fox knew better than to ask what troubled him. That time had passed.

And then there was Riyo. Riyo, who had brightened his life in ways he had never thought possible. For a brief moment in time, she allowed Fox to live outside of himself, to exist in a universe where he had a past _and_ a future. But a moment was all it had ended up being—even by Clone standards, their time together had been unbearably short. He had once thought he would have been satisfied with even the most fleeting moments of love and happiness, but he had been wrong.

No, this was most assuredly _not_ the path he would have chosen for himself.

The smoke was still irritating him. He tried to blink it away but only succeeded in changing the readouts on his HUD. He suppressed an audible sigh as he went to work reopening the pertinent data streams. He brought every back in order quickly, and yet—

Something still prickled at his intuition. His attention drifted back to the Temple, his eye drawn to one of the nearby blast holes that peppered the building. It was just large enough for a man in armor to get through and it seemed as if the smoke swirled _in_ to it, rather than out. _Come see._

He wondered if it was Master Nu, using the Force to lure him into a trap. He found that he did not care. He meant to say something to his men, but the words did not come. Vader’s command— _no one enters_ —ricocheted around his bucket, but Fox pushed it away.

No one seemed to notice when he stepped into the Temple. He was assaulted by ozone smell of old blaster fire and the peculiar bell-strike to the sinuses of a lit lightsaber. It confused him for a moment—maybe the filters on his helmet really were malfunctioning—but when he blinked, he realized that his vision was no longer bracketed by his ever-shifting HUD. His bucket had somehow ended up in his hands, and he spent a moment staring into the impassive black of its t-visor. He glanced back to the troops, but the battalion seemed to have all but faded from view. It was as if the few steps he had taken had traversed miles.

He turned to face forward, and the whole galaxy turned as well.

The smell of blaster fire disappeared with a whisper, _Here is what should have been_.

He was standing outside the Temple again, but it was vibrant in a way Fox had never seen in all his years on Coruscant. There were the Jedi—there were so many of his brothers—there were so many citizens—all amassed so as to make his head spin. Joy charged the atmosphere like lightening, and thoughts of crowd control suddenly vanished. Younglings used their early Force abilities to toss balls of confetti out the Temple windows, and was that the clang of _Dha Werda Verda_? It felt like a lifetime had passed since Fox had heard that.

His focus fixed on that rash idiot General Skywalker and next to him—oh. Oh. Fox recognized _that_ ARC trooper. The name had almost formed on his lips when he was distracted by the clamp of a hand in his. He looked down, and there stood all his hopes and dreams in one whirl of blue and gold joy. Her smile was more electric than the entire crowd around the Temple, and Fox knew that this was not some stolen moment and secret touch. His home was with Riyo, his life was with Riyo, his future—his long, full future—was with Riyo.

He leaned down to hear what she was saying, happy babblings about hard-fought peace and well-earned rest.

“Balance, Fox,” she said and was gone.

_No, no, no—_ he wanted that one. He wanted that future, that world, that life. _That_ was his choice, if only—

_That time has passed. This also could have been._

He told her to leave the Core, and she did not.

 _I must fight for the interests of my people,_ she told him.

 _I must protect my brothers,_ he replied. He rested his forehead against hers, and allowed his tears to track down onto her face. He protected her, as well, as much as he could. But the galaxy was shifting in ways no one had anticipated. Oh, the Emperor was still playing relatively nice with the nonhumans in the Senate who had something valuable to offer him.

But Pantora had nothing but a tenacious senator with a sterling track record of working well with Jedi.

 _Please go home,_ he whispered into her hair.

It was dark, but those golden eyes of hers caught the light better than even his genetically enhanced human ones. She wiped away more tears that he had hoped would not fall. _As soon as the treaty is ratified. I promise._

The treaty that would have protected Pantora was _not_ ratified, and Fox awoke one morning to find her name on a list of those who had been detained and summarily executed by the Imperial Guard for treason. He read the words over and over again, watched them break apart and reform in the never-ending wash of his tears, and—

He pushed away that world with as much force as he had tried to cling to the one that had come before it. Thank every power that was or would be that Riyo _had_ listened to him, that she _had_ left Coruscant and allowed Pantora to fall off to the wayside of Imperial interest.

The pasts that might have been started to fade and fracture, and he turned around. _This could happen._

He is old when he steps off the transport, a battered thing filled with refugees. It’s taken ages to get to the point where he is expendable enough to make himself invisible, to no longer have anyone to care about leaving behind. They let him remain a commander, but he suspects it is just so no one need take the trouble of filling out the paperwork for a demotion and reassignment.

There were unexpected blessings that came with being forgotten. He hadn’t been face to face with the Emperor in years. There’s a relief in that that Fox can’t properly articulate.

Now, he’s as good as dead. He could’ve filtered in with the refugees to Naboo—Naboo was _always_ taking refugees—but he left the hope of peaceful lakes and flower-filled meadows to the glut of Alderaanians who now felt the heat of the Death Star’s scope on their backs. Instead, he picked an ice world with a familiar old name and hoped against hope that he was as good of a detective as he used to be.

It’s all hands on deck at the Processing Center to deal with the mass of refugees, and that’s a good thing. It means even senior administrators are on the floor, and Fox knows which line to get in. There are two Pantorans behind the desk, the young one working the console, the older offering kind direction and encouragement. Fox lets her voice wash over his anxiety and banish it. Even if everything goes wrong from here on out, at least he heard her speak one last time.

“Next,” calls the young Pantoran, and Fox steps up. “Name?”

He ignores the young one, eyes fixed on the older. Stars alive, he can’t remember his name when he’s looking at her. He could never quite imagine what she would look like now, not old like he is or young as she had been. Now, he doesn’t need to. She's as warm as the red armor paint he hasn't been able to use in years, and twice as striking.

“Take a number, instead?” he asks, and watches her attention snap to him and focus.

“Why don’t you go on your break now?” she murmurs to the trainee, who goes off without complaint. “So. We can work with numbers, but I always like to have a name. They’re more—personal.”

“Sure,” he says, and feels as stupid as a shiny. “F – O –”

“X,” she finishes, and when she looks up there’s as much hope in her eyes as there is in his heart. “Welcome to Orto Plutonia, Fox.”

That world spins away just as all the others did, and Fox feels like a piece of flimsi in a windstorm. He tries to grasp something—anything.

_This one could also happen. This one may yet be._

He’s healing from another injury—at twenty-six, his reflexes aren’t quite what they once were—but all the pain vanishes when the door slides open and he sees her. He supposes it’s his Jango is showing, but he _likes_ this practical, ramshackle look of well-worn leather boots and tailored jumpsuit on her. Her hair is cropped short and dyed dark and he makes a mental note to remind her to touch up her eyebrows and lashes. The natural lavender is starting to peek through.

She perches on their bed next to him. She doesn’t take his hand or coo over him, but she doesn’t need to. He knows. She knows. There has been no time wasted in this life. They’ve been together through so much, and they will be together until the end. Whatever that means, whenever it comes.

“Transmission from Fulcrum,” she says.

Fox can’t help but snark back, “Which one?”

“Don’t worry; the one you like,” she laughs. And then she does take his hand, and maybe even coos a little, and they talk of what’s to come.

It’s a hard fight, Fox knows, and it’s a miserable galaxy. But their bed is soft, couched with blankets and pillows from a half dozen worlds. Her touch is soft, even if the skin of her hands has callused almost as much as his own. His heart is soft, too, almost unimaginably so. He doubts that he will live to see the peace they are so desperately striving for. That does not matter. After all, Fox had not been built for peace. But he hopes and thinks that Riyo _will_ live to see it, and that satisfies him. It’s a good life even now, because they fight together and for something worth fighting for. _We will share everything, and we will raise—_

The whispers are coming faster and louder now, a cacophony of futures winding and unwinding in front of Fox’s eyes. They disappear like dreams in the morning light. They cannot be chased and they cannot be caught. Can they?

He spins around again and is outside of this smoldering Temple, his feet dangling off the ground.

 _This is what will be,_ echoes in his ear.

No one is touching him, but he feels the durasteel grasp of a hand closing around his throat, and he knows—he knows— _he knows_ —

_This is not what I chose._

The future is frozen as Fox tries to make sense of what is, and was, and will be.

“Perimeter secure, sir,” he hears ARC-CT-1812—Cannon— report. The smoke from the Temple ruins stings. _There is always a choice._

 _Yes, I know,_ Fox thinks. The future shatters before him. He bends every advantage of his genetics, every hour of training, every strength that hope and love can afford him and he searches out the flashes of blue in those futures. After all, he was made for one thing. There is one set purpose. There is one inevitable destiny. He need only choose what it will be.

He finds her eyes and follows them.


End file.
